113
MAGIC IN MODERNITY
58. Unfortunately, Regardie does not rt\'eal who these clairvoyants were or when the
experiments took place. lt appears likely, howe\•er, that it was in the Stella Matutina period.
The inforination and quotations in this and the fo llowing two paragraphs a n~ from R.egardie,
Golden Dawn, 626-19. The lecture by Brodie•lnnes n1entioned below is reproduced in part at
pp. 627- 28.
59. lb;d., 628-29.
60. LaVey, Sdtauic Bible, 15;.
61. LaVey, ..Cnochian Pronunciation Guide,'' Cloven Hoof, ~lay 1970, available online at
http://www.churchofsatan.co1n/Pages/£nochianGuide.html.
61. Ibid. See also l,.1.Vcy, .. Satanism,'' ap~ndix no. 1, in Michael Aqu ino, The Church of
Satan, 5th ed. (San FranciS<o: Michael Aquino, 2002), 441.
63. Quoted in Aquino, Cl,urcli ofSatan, 65.
64. Ibid., 66. Aquino later split fro1n the church to found h is own group, the Temple of Set.
65. Stephen Skinner. ed., /olu1 Dee's Actiorr with Spirits {l.ondon: Askin Publishers, 197-4).
66. See Pas1 and Rabat~. "'Langue aogelique, langut m.lgiq_ue," u9; Leo Vinci. C,ni-ealzon1a! An t11ocl1ia11 Dictiorrary {l.ondon: Regency Press, 1976), 12: and La)•cock, "Angelic
Language o r Mortal Folly?"
67, See, for exan1pJe, King, Ritual Afagic in Errgland, 187.
68. Ste\'en Ashe, e.mail to the author, March 2. 1008.
69. The Heptarchia lrlyslica of John Dee, e<l. Robert Turner (Edinburgh: ~l.-ignun1 Opus
Hermetic Sourceworks, 1983), xxii.
70. Ibid ., 12.
71. For a full discussion, see Asprem, Argu111g with Angels, chap. 7.
72. Geoffrey Jan1es, '[he £11ochia11 Evocation of Dr. John Dee (Gillette, N.J.: Heptang.le
Books, 1984), 194.
73. See \.Vouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Acaden,y: Rejected Knowledge ;,r l¥ester-n
Culture {Cambridge: Cambridge University Prt'ss, 2012).
74. See also Aspren1. Proble,11 of Disenchan1ment.
75. Karel Oobbdaere, ..A-S$t'$Sing Secularisation Theory," in l•.tew Approaches to tht Study
of Rtligion, ed.. Peter Antes, Annin Geertz. and Randi \Varne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004),.
2:229-53.
76. LaVey, Sawnic Bible, u9.
77. Jamt'S, F.rrochiarr l;vocatiorr, xxiv, xxii.
78. Geoffrey Ja1nes, 71,e Errochian ,\1agick of Dr. John Dee: 1ht Most Powerful System of
J\1,~gick 111 Its Original Unexpurgnted Form (St. Paul, Minn.: LJe,vtll)•n. 1998). xii.
79. Benjamin Rowe, "'Are the Angels Real?," Enochian·L Arclih•es (1996-2001), accessed
April 27, 2008, http://www.hollyfeld.o rg/hea\·en/Email/enochian•1, No\fe1nber 1996.
So. Neither is this str.-itegy uncon1n,on: I also noticed and discussed it in my qualitath·~
research on ritual magicians in Nor way. See Egil Aspre1n. "'n1elema og ritual magi: 1\,fed niagt
som livsholdning i n1oderne vestlig esotcrisn1e," Chaos 46 (2006): 113- 37.
81. Rowe, "Are the Angels Real?," Nove,nber 15, 1996.
6
BABALON LAUNCHING:
JACK PARSONS, ROCKETRY, AND THE "METHOD OF SCIENCE"
Erik Davis
Is it difficult. betv,cen 1natter and spirit?
-Liber 49, 1hc Book of Baba/on
Jack Parsons, who was born in Southern California in 1914, racked up a good
number of conventional successes in his short life. A self-taught chemist and
rocket enthusiast, Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as
a successful aerospace company, while making breakthroughs in solid fuel
technolog y that helped launch America's space program.' Yet, as he pursued
his scientific work, Parsons also threw himself into intense occult practice. He
became an exuberant follower of Aleister Crowley's "magickal" religio n of
Thelema and a hedonistic libertarian whose polyamorous and psychedelic
mores foreshadowed the sexual, esoteric, and Dionysian counterculture to
con1c.2The conjunction of significant aerospace innovation and intense occult
activity, together with Parsons's early demise in a home lal>oratory explosio n at
the age of thirty-seven, lends his story a strikingly mythic character. Indeed, if
the story of Jack Parsons did not exist, it would need to be invented. But if it
were invented- that is, if his life were presented as the fictio n it in so many
ways resembles-it would be hard to believe, even as fiction. The na rrative
wou ld seem contrived, at o nce too pulp and too poetic, and too finely keyed to
the central theme that inspires this chapter: the modern relationship between
technology and the occult, between rationality and the ecstatic, between what
Crowley himself called, in the motto fo r the A:,A:.-theesoteric teachi ng o rder
he created in 1907 to propagate the philosophy and practice of Thelema- the
"method of science" and the "aim of religion."
Understood as a specifically n1oder n current of discourse, practice, and n1ore
Or less explicit religiosity, "the occult" casts its enchanting shadows against the
implacable backdro p of rationalism and the process that Max Weber famously
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.MAGIC IN 1'l0D6RNJ·rv
described as the disenchantment of the world. In "Science as a Vocation," a
speech delivered in Munich toward the close of World War J, Weber made clear
that this disenchantment- Entzauberung- is rooted in thousands of years of
cultural development and cannot be tied solely to the rise of modern science and
its pursuit of "rational experiment." Disenchantment has les_~ to do with the
accuracy or social prevalence of naturalistic accounts of the world than with the
dominance of an internal-one might even say a "spiritual"-attitude of rationalization, an attitude rooted partly in transformations of Protestant sensibility
but manifested in the secular notion that "one can, in principle, master all
things by calculation." As such, even though the actual objects, forces, tools, and
processes encountered in the modern world remain mysterious to most of its
subjects, the ideology of rationalism banishes magical spirits and otherworldly
forces from our accounts of and interactions with such mysteries. Along similar
lines, Weber believed that technical and instrumental processes and motives
were necessarily riven from the world of meanings provided by religion, arguing that "the tension between the value-spheres of 'science' and the sphere of
'the holy' is unbridgeable."'
The career of Jack Parsons- who passionately embraced both science and
the occult-suggests that the space between Weber's two value spheres may not
be quite as unbridgeable as Weber asserted. However, some dose readers of
Weber discern more ambiguity in his writings than the passage quoted ab-Ove
suggests.• Indeed, "Science as a Vocation" includes Weber's own perceptive
insights into those modes of rationalism that are sometimes employed by
modernity's apparently irrationalist refuseniks. In support of his claim that
science provides no answers to questions about ultimate values, Weber
describes the romantic and 1nystical rejection of rattonaliz.ation announced by
the youth of his day, who sought redemption from the artificial abstractions
and "specifically irreligious power" of science:
BABALON LAUNCHING
121
Parsons and his circle in mind- "countercultural spirituality." Ake)' element
of this countercultural spirituality is the link between religious subjectivity
and "experience as such," a somewhat paradoxical commingling of mystical
aspirations and hedonistic excess into a single cult of experience intentionally
directed against a disenchanted workaday existence and toward a recovery of
what Weber calls, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, "the blood-and-thesap of true life.',.
As a disciple of the sorts of personal commitments to scientific rationality
that his essay describes, Weber himself remained essentially unmoved by the
claims of countercultural spirituality, whose hunger for exotic religious traditions and psychic experiences he dismissed, in rather "scientific" tones, as
"plain humbug or self-deception."' Nonetheless, as Peter Pels points out,
Weber's own account of science includes and even stresses irrational affects or
intensities. Weber describes the "strange intoxication" of and "passion" for
precise intellectual labor that he believes is required of someone who authentically chooses science as a vocation, a dedication whose character he elsewhere
compares to the "ghost of dead religious beliefs."• In addition, he describes the
"intuitions" that lead to scientific advancement; resembling creative leaps of
art, they have "nothing to do with any cold calculation."9 This Dionysian
dimension of science will reverberate through our consideration of Parsons,
and it suggests at least one bridge that links the spheres of science and religion.
But such a bridge runs both ways, as Weber himself recognized in his canny
acknowledgment (quoted above) of the rationality at play within the romantic
mysticism of his day, a rationality that takes the form of various "methods" by
which the irrational is brought to consciousness. As we will see, this precise
conjunction of technical procedures with mystical or unconscious domains of
experience characterizes the occult current that Parsons embraced and that led
Tanya M. Luhrmann to describe modern magic, in a perhaps unconscious
echo ofVVeber, as "the romantic rationalist's religion." 10
Living in union with the divine ... is one of the fundamental watchwords
one hears among German youth, whose feelings are attuned to religion
or who crave religious experiences. They crave not only religious experi·
ence but experience as such. The only thing that is strange is the method
that is now followed: the spheres of the irrational, the only spheres that
Many strains of Weber's "modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism" exist, but there is something uniquely dynamic and revealing about modern
magic. As Randall Styers has shown, magic has long been treated as a moving
target that both reinscribes and subverts modernity's self-representations, making magic "a foil for modernity."" But what sort of foil? In Jonathan Z. Smith's
inteHectualisn1 has not yet touched, are now raised into consciousness
and put under its lens. For in practice this is where the n1odern intellectualist form of romanlic irrationalism leads.s
view, magic sometimes appears in classic anthropological accounts as a double
Here. Weber eerily prophesies many of the alternative streams of spirituality to
come, \vhat we might term-"1ith the esoteric and bohemian 1nilieu of Jack
negation or as • doubly dual." Magic may be characterized in opposition to religion or to science (which are themselves opposed), but this characteriz.ition does
not, by ,.,ay of that contrast, come any closer to establishing an identity or posi•
live relation bet \,·cen 1nagic and the remaining tern1 of the opposition; contrasting magic lo religion. say, docs not thereby square magic with science. Even in
122
BABA LON l.AVNCHTNG
MAC JC IN MODERNITY
those comparisons between magic and science or religion that stress the continuity of the terms, magic still plays an essentially negative role-as a "shadow reality" that reflects the more substantive characteristics of religion or science "in a
distorting fun-house mirror.""
This flickering antinomy is also reproduced in the tension between the two
main accounts of traditional magic proffered by classic anthropologists (and
trotted out perennially in discussions like this one). The "intellectualist" views
of Tylor and Frazer cast magic as a protoscience of calculated instrumental
control that depends upon a semideterministic theory of animist forces, but
whose underlying "analogic consciousness" underm ines the rational application of associations, thereby rendering magic "the bastard sister of science.""
On the other hand, the "symbolic" account of magic, ultimately derived from
Durkheim's conception of the social function of religion, instead looks at
magical practices and behaviors as an expressive, cultural communication
whose meaning and effects should be judged in terms of symbolic or dramatic
significance rather than in the causal terms of protoscientific efficacy and
instrumental control. Stanley Tambiah, who contributed to the symbolic
approach through recourse to J. L. Austin's notion of performative speech,
offers this account of magic's Janus face: "On the one hand, (magic) seems to
imitate the logic of technical/technological action that seeks to transform
nature or the world of natural things and manifestations. On the other hand,
its structure is also transparently rhetorical and performative (in that it consists of acts to create effects on human actors according to accepted social
conventions)."" Whether this split is considered an artifact of our interpretative categories or not, the important point here is the persistence of the antinomy itself. Once again, magic flickers, a shadowy ambivalence defined against
and through the more substantial conflict between religion and science, contestable terms that nonetheless achieve some measure of coherence precisely
through the fluctuations of magic's"doubly dual" contrast. For these and other
reasons, Smith thinks that magic has outlived its usefulness as a term within
the study of religion, which already possesses sha rper, more analytically exact
words to describe the various domains and practices covered by its umbrella.
Yet there may be something paradoxically useful about the term's instability,
particularly in discussions of magic in modernity. Rather than a reined category that co-founds a set of oppositions, magic might perhaps more productively
be understood as a boundary condition, a phantasmic phenomenon that, for us
moderns anyway, cannot help but flicker between symbol and technique, reli·
gion and science, desire and device.
For the purposes of this chapter, we will therefore make a distinction
between the occult as a "holy" value sphere and magic as a more ambiguous and
113
mobile set of practices and attitudes that fluctuate between religion and science. This difference is particularly important given Crowley's explicit desire to
present Thelema as a revealed religion that involves, but is not strictly identified with, the practice of magic. Thelema's aim, again, is "religion," but though
its method is "science:• that science is better understood as a naturalist revision
of magical method, one that is itself partly based on the classical sociological
accounts of magic. Crowley, who, as Marco Pasi has noted, attended Trinity
College when Frazer taught there, loved The Golden Bough, and Parsons frequently recommended the book to newcomers interested in the ways of wizardry. Both Crowley and Parsons were influenced by Frazer's account of
magic as a protoscience, an influence whose intoxicating fruit introduced a
striking irony into modern magical discourse. Although 11ie Golde,i Bough
was intended to marshal evidence of the intellectual errors of benighted
primitives in the superior light of modern science, Frazer's evolutionary
account inadvertently provided dissatisfied moderns with material that
enabled them to imaginatively contest the dominance of Frazer's rationalist
and evolutionary account of science-an account that. in Parsons's c.ase. also
arguably frames his own technological practice. This is only one of the productive paradoxes that characterize Jack Parsons's peculiar life, and even with the
distortions of condensed biography in mind, we must now sketch the bare
outlines of that life before we explore the interaction of magic and science
within one midcentury Californian milieu.
Pulp Parsifal
John Whiteside Parsons was born in Pasadena, a genteel community of arts
and science tucked beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, from which flows the
seasonal stream that carves out the Arroyo Seco canyon that borders the city to
the west." Parsons's mother divorced his father shortly after his birth, and the
boy was raised in privilege by his mother and grandparents, although the family later fell on hard times. As a youth, Parsons was a pampered, dreamy sort,
lost in books and without many friends. At the age of thirteen, he attempted to
conjure up the devil and balked in terror at the apparent success of his efforts.
lie also became interested in chemistry and, especially, rocketry, which at the
time was largely the province of boys and amateur enthusiasts who, like Parsons, consumed science-fiction pulp magazines like Hugo Gernsback's Amazi,ig Stories. Given his struggles in school and the many spelling errors in his
texts, some have concluded that Parsons ,.,as dyslexic; in any case, his formal
education did not go very far beyond high school." Nonetheless. his knowledge
114
MAGIC IN MODERNITY
of chemistry took off, along with many of the black-powder model rockets he
built with his pal Ed Forman, with whom he adopted the motto Ad astra per
aspera-through hardships to the stars.
In 1935, after marrying his first wife, Hele.n, Parsons invited Forman to
accompany him to a lecture at nearby Caltech that concluded with speculations about "stratospheric passenger carriers." Through contacts made at the
gatherillg, Parsons and Forman met Frank Malina, a Caltech student who
worked for GALClT, all aerody11amics laboratory run by the legendary Hungarian professor Theodore von Karman. Excited by the encounter, Malina was
able to convince von Karman to let the three young men, two of them
unschooled amateurs, form a team to study rocket propulsion under the auspices of GALCIT. Setting up in the Arroyo Seco, just above Devil's Gate Dam,
the team began experimenting with stationary rockets. Eventually, they were
allowed to perform their experiments on the Caltech campus itself, although a
few wayward tests forced the group- now labeled the "suicide squad"- to
return to the arroyo." For years, the squad worked without financial support,
Parsons and Forman picking up extra work at explosives firms; in the way of
Southern Californians, Parsons and Malina also co-wrote a screenplay they
hoped to sell to Hollywood. In 1939, Caltech was granted s1,ooo to colltinue the
research; later that year, von Karman submitted a successful proposal to found
a research station in the arroyo that would eventually grow into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Leaving the dream of stratospheric sounding rockets behind,
the team began to focus on constructing rocket motors for military planes,
devices that they called JATOs (for jet-assisted takeoffs). (To distance the project from the adolescent associations of"rocket," von Karman and Malina had
started using the term "jet" instead.)" As the chemist and explosives expert,
Parsons experimented with both liquid and solid fuels. In August 1941, the
GALCIT crew attached JATOs to a test airplane, enabling the craft to achieve
rapid takeoff on rocket power alone.
Unfortunately, the solid fuel used for the JATOs was quite unstable. But in
the summer of 1942, Parsons made a breakthrough in the science of solid fuel,
creating a material called CALC!T-53, the subsequellt development of which
would lead directly to the Minuteman and Polaris missiles of the postwar era."
One tale suggests that Parsons's leap-which by all accounts was a classic
eureka moment-was inspired by his historical knowledge of Greek fire, a
flaming viscous weapon of unknown composition used most famously by the
Byzantine Empire. Other stories invoke the humbler inspiration of roofers layillg down tar. 20 With the success of GALCJT-53, Parsons and Forman decided
to form a company that would manufacture JATOs; along with von Karman,
Malina, and a few others, the men founded the Aerojet Engineering Corpora·
BA8ALON LAUNCHING
125
tion, which became one of the world's largest manufacturers of rockets." In
1958, von KArman declared Parsons, whom he described as "a delightful screwball," the third-most important person in the development of the American
space program."
While Parsons was refining GALC!T-53, he and Helen moved into an ornate
redwood mansion in Hollywood once owned by Arthur Fleming, Caltech's
greatest benefactor. Parsons converted the building into a rooming house and
placed ads in the local paper specifying that "only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or other exotic types need apply.""' The building also
became the new home oft he Agape Lodge No. 2, the only functioning lodge of
the Ordo Templi Orientis at the time. A quasi-masonic order founded by Germall esotericists in the early twentieth century, the OTO had been reconstructed by Aleister Crowley in the 1910s to become, along with the A:,A:., the
principal institutional vehicle of Crowley's religion of Thelema. Parsons had
first visited the Agape Lodge in 1938 after coming across a copy of Crowley's
early work Ko11x om Pax on the shelves of a Pasadena used-car dealer he knew.
Parsons avidly consumed Crowley's writings and took to the lodge's weekly
performances of the Gnostic Mass. Toe head of the lodge, Wilfred Smith,
became a good frielld of Parsons's and his magical mentor. Parsons also corresponded with Crowley himself, who was dependent on the lodge for the
meager income that sustained him until his death in 1947. Jack and Helen were
initiated into the lodge in 1941, Jack adopting a motto in atrocious Latin- Thelema Optentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae- that formed the acronym TOPAN,
i.e., to Pan. 24
"The Parsonage." as Parsons's mansion came to be called, was briefly "an
adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism," according to one of Parsons's biographers.25 Shortly after Parsons and
his circle moved in, the police showed up upon receiving reports of a nude
pregnant woman jumping over an open fire in the backyard. Many in the
Agape Lodge and the Parsonage were committed to free love; though the sexual
magic-solo, hetero, and homo-enshrilled in the higher grades of the OTO
might have been a factor, this partner swapping may also simply reflect the
erotic realities of midcentury Los Angeles bohemia linked to both esotericism
and political radicalism.26 When the couple moved into the Parsonage, Helen
was already sleeping with Smith, while Parsons had taken up with Helen's
younger half sister, Sara, who went by the name Betty. Parsons became the
rnost charisn1atic man in the lodge. Given his wit, good looks, and money, it is
unsurprising that the senior disciple Jane Wolfe unofficially declared Parsons
"the real successor of Therion•- i.e., of Crowley himself." For his part, Crowley was disappointed in Smith's hedonism and lackluster recruiting and saw
IZ6
).fAGIC IN M008RNJTY
Parsons as the dynamic leader that Thelcma required. In 1943, Parsons became
head of the lodge.
Like many occultists, Parsons avidly consumed science fiction and fantasy
literature. In the early 1940s, he attended meetings of the Los Angeles Science
Fiction Society, where he befriended Robert Heinlein and met the young Ray
Bradbury. In 1945, he also encountered a voluble redheaded sci-fi writer named
L. Ron Hubbard, whom Parsons described to Crowley as "the most Thelemic
person I have ever met."28 Hubbard moved into the Parsonage and soon took
up with Betty. The affair wounded Parsons, but it did not stop him from
recruiting Hubbard to play a key role in what would become one of the most
storied occult rites in American history: the Babalon Working."" Using the
Enochian system of calls received by John Dee at the close of the sixteenth
century, and with Hubbard playing the role of Dee's scryer. Edward Kelly. the
t\YO men embarked on a series of intense workings that incorporated, at vari-
ous points. the OTO's "VIII0 rite of masturbation," Prokofiev's Violin Concerto
no. 2, and a number of moderately impressive paranormal phenomena. The
first part of the ritual, designed to evoke an "elemental:' or nature spirit,
resulted, to Parsons's mind anyway. in the relatively synchronistic appearance
at the Parsonage of the striking Marjorie Cameron, his next- and last- great
love and sex magic partner.'° The latter parts of the working were intended to
invoke Babalon herself, the holy whore of Thelemic mythology. Though Parsons sometimes suggested that Babalon was an apocalyptic force of transformation that would express itself through existing human beings. he seemed to
have generally believed that a literal incarnation would take place. Such a thing
did not, apparently, come to pass, although the Babalon Working did lead
Parsons, echoing his spiritual father, to produce his own revealed text. In February 1946, alone and positioned next to the two power lines whose crossing
framed his favorite power spot in the Mojave Desert, Parsons invoked Babalon,
who appeared before him and commanded him to write down Liber 49-a bold
and, it must be said, unsuccessful attempt to add a fourth chapter to 7he Book
of tlte Law, the core scripture of Crowley's religion, channeled through Crow-
ley>s ,.,ife, Rose, in a Cairo hotel room in 1904.' 1
In late 1944, the General Tire and Rubber Company acquired Aerojet, and
Parsons was out of a job. In George Pendle's account, both Parsons and For·
man were pressured to sell their shares on the eve of the acquisition. part!)'
because Parsons was deemed an inappropriate shareholder thanks to his
eccentricity and constant womanizing.32 Parsons subsequently poured the
bulk of his life's savings into a new company formed with Hubbard, who pro·
ceedcd to take off with both Betty and the funds. Pursuing the couple to Florida,
Parsons discovered that the pair had sailed away on a newly purchased racht.
BABALON LAUNCHING
127
A few hours later, Parsons invoked the martial spirit Bartzabel in a hotel room;
"coincidentally," as J. Gordon Melton has it, a terrible squall forced Hubbard to
return to shore."' Disgusted with Parsons's foolishness and his increasingly
wayward occult workings, Crowley grew disenchanted, and by the end of 1946
Parsons had sold the Parsonage and resigned as head of the lodge. In 1948,
owing to his involvement with the "love cult" as well as with a Communist
group whose meetings he briefly attended, the FBI revoked Parsons's security
clearance. It was restored for a time, but by January 1952, Parsons was permanently barred from the burgeoning military-industrial complex and earned his
keep making explosive effects for Hollywood movies. The intensity of Parsons's
postlodge magical work waxed and waned, and though he wrote a few powerful and prophetic essays on both the occult and the politics of freedom, his
final letters both reflect and describe a worrying oscillation between what he
called "manic hysteria and depressing melancholy."" In June 1952, 011 the eve of
a move to Mexico, Parsons was working in his home laboratory when, according to most accounts, he accidentally dropped a highly explosive chemical and
blew himself up. Hideously maimed, Parsons remained conscious for an hour
or so before passing away at the age of thirty-seven. Twenty years later, the
International Astronomical Union named an astronomical feature after him: a
crater on the dark side of the moon.
This astonishing story has been told and retold many times both inside and
outside occult circles, with Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival (1972) standing as
the first published account beyond Agapi Lodge records." The tale was also
brought to light by writers seeking to expose the wayward origins of the Church
of Scientolog)', though for its part the CoS insists that Hubbard was sent in by
the government to "break up a black magic group.""' Mike Davis could not
resist including a brief and garbled account in City of Quartz, so marvelous an
allegory did it provide for the emergence of Southern California's "postwar
science-based economy.'~7 Richard Metzger called Parsons the "James Dean of
occultism"-a charismatic figure, in both a Weberian and a Hollywood sense,
"''hose story resonates with the mythic yarns in the pulp l(scientific ron1ances"
he consumed .33 Tellers of the tale, including those who are critical of Parsons,
also cannot help but point out the apparently synchronistic elements of the
story, the way in which "the facts" themselves seem to resonate on a level of
fiction and symbol. Readers familiar with the life of John Dee, for example,
remark on the curious echoes between Parsons's relationship with Hubbard
and Dee's with his scryer, Edward Kelly. who is often represented in the literature as a charlatan and whose angelic messages-especially those received
from the same Seventh Aire that Parsons and Hubbard explored in the Babalon
Working- convinced Dee that the two men should swap wives.•• On another
u8
BA BA LON LAUNCHING
M"AGIC IN MODERNITY
track, and in light of the circumstances of Parsons's death, writers from Grant
forward have noted the recurrent image of fire in Liber 49 and The Book of
Baba/on, Parsons's unpublished but widely circulated account of the Babalon
Working; in one ritual commandment, spoken through Hubbard to Parsons,
Babalon declares that "thou shalt become living flame."'• Even the material
that Parsons accidentally dropped in the lab-fulminate of mercury-strikes
an esoteric chord that would not resound had Parsons dropped nitroglycerin.
These seductive serendipities and symbolic reverberations recall Jeffrey
Kripal's argument that occult and paranormal phenomena are, "like the act of
interpretive writing itself, primarily semiotic or textual processes." In other
words, they act in some ways like texts, and in particular like fantastic texts-a
genre of writing that Kripal links with the uncertainty induced by the "inability to decide what is real and what is fictional within a text (or a life)." Moreover,
the productive uncertainty of the paranormal text is contagious. Engaging the
occult bermeneutically, we find ourselves "reading the paranormal writing
us."" One might say that writing about the life of Jack Parsons means, in part,
to be written by the expressive and symbolic "magic" that marks that life-replicating, at least for the sake of the story, some of what E. P. Thompson characterized as the "psychic compulsion" inherent in occult material."
But what sort of tale is this? In terms of pulp genre, Parsons's "real life story"
is not just an occult fantasy-it is a science fantasy. In other words, whatever
historical significance we may draw from Parsons's role in the transmission of
Thelema into countercultural California, the charismatic force of the man's
story equally involves the explosive technology of American rocketry. It is
impossible to know whether Parsons "actually" crossed the Abyss and deserved
to declare himself, as he did late in his career, a Magister Templi, one of the
supreme grades of the A:.A:.. But he unquestionably co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, held U.S. patents no. 2,563,265, and 2,783,138 (among others),
and invented the method of casting rocket fuel used to produce the solid fuel
boosters for the space shuttle." Parsons compels because his story takes place
at a crossroads: the conjunctio of the irrational and the rational, of hedonistic
mysticism and high technology, of ascent as spiritual ecstasy and as rocket
thrust. In Weber's terms, Parsons seems to have recognized and incarnated a
dedicated "vocational" attitude toward both science and the romantic irrationalism of"the holy." In straddling the spheres-and sometimes knocking them
together-he provides an unusually clear view of the flicker of modern magic
as it leaps between the poles of science and the supernatural, naturalism and
religion.
The rest of this chapter will look at how Parsons negotiated the relationship
between his occult and his scientific work, an ongoing and perhaps inevitably
129
contradictory negotiation made more interesting by the clear distinctions
Parsons himself drew. Martin Starr, in his exhaustive biography of Wilfred
Smith and the Agape Lodge, asserts that Parsons's technical career did "not
intersect with his occult life," and that Parsons actively sought to keep the
"hemispheres of his life" apart." Malina, who was skeptical about the occult
but tolerant of Parsons's interests, also wrote that his GALCIT partner operated in "two domains." In their discussions about rocket design, "there ,vas no
input from what you would say alchemy or magic. In other words he functioned
in compartments."'' The compartmentalization that Malina describes is not
uncommon among scientists with religious commitments, but Parsons was too
dynamic and erratic a person to keep his commitments so static. Science and
the sacred may have remained conceptually separated hemispheres in Parsons's
mind, but in practice they leaked into each other-desires crossed boundaries,
images and representations resonated, method snuck into magic and symbol
into science. Stanley Tambiah, echoing Bronislaw Malinowski, has argued for
the need to pay close attention to those cultural situations in which "a person
can in a certain context behave mystically, and then switch in another context
to a practical empirical everyday frame of mind." In such situations, the interpretive goal is not only to understand these different contexts but to appreciate
the transitional or boundary conditions "in ,vhich code switching occurs.''16
The intellectual pluralism that allowed Parsons to keep the value spheres of
science and the occult apart only intensifies the interest and illumination of
their points of contact and resonance. Indeed, at the close of this chapter I
suggest that magic, even as it feeds the marginal milieu of occult religiosity and
countercultural spirituality, also makes its home in modernity as this very code
switching itself-a pragmatic, relativistic, and in some ways naturalist fluctuation between science and the holy.
The Method of Science
In a brief autobiographical text written toward the end of his life, Parsons
describes his adolescent interest in chemistry and science as a "counterbal•
ance" to his coming magical awakening. His knowledge of rocketry and explosives paved a practical route to prestige and financial success, but it also became
the matrix that provided the "scientific method" necessary, he says, for magical
attainment." Here, on the one hand, the worldly achievements linked with
Parsons's technical prowess are contrasted with the less tangible rewards of
magical experience. But science also provJdes a ''method"- and not, please
note, a theory- that affords a productive passage between the worlds and a
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MAGCC CN .MODERNITY
technique for mystical success. While there are a number of points where the
code switching between occult religion and science occur in Parsons's life, this
notion of"method" is the most significant. It is not, certainly, original to him;
many modern accounts in both occult and, as we have seen, anthropological
literature speak of magic as a sort of applied "science• linked to protocols and
material processes. The most important emic account, certainly to Parsons,
belongs to Crowley, who at times provided a deeply pragmatic, experimental,
and naturalistic account of "magick." As noted, Crowley also enshrined the
scientific method in the motto for the A:,A:., the Thelemic mystery school he
founded before remaking the Ordo Templi Orientis (to which Parsons also
belonged): "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
Since Crowley's understanding of"the method of science" was so significant
to Parsons, we must spend some time with it here. To begin, we should turn to
Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge, in which the author identifies three central strategies employed by modern esoteric movements in their quest for
legitimization: tradition, experience, and science. The category of tradition
does not help much with the self-conscious innovations of Thelema; experience, through which groups and individuals ground their claims in the direct
personal experience of spiritual realities, will be discussed later (although in a
different register from that of Hammer, who stresses the unitive and mystical
dimension of esoteric experience). The important strategy here is sciencemore precisely, the attempts to legitimize occult theories through some adaptation of scientific discourse. Beginning with Theosophy and its "esoteric
science," Hammer shows how various groups use science as both a foil and a
base of support, at once a source of naturalistic confirmation of belief and a
more ambivalent indication that the holistic integration of religion and science
has yet to arrive or can be achieved through the development of the esoteric
current in question. Hammer proclaims that the esoteric position "bases the
precise details of its scientism, its critique, and its picture of a spiritualized or
're-enchanted' science on a form of parasitism on the mainstream science of its
age."'8 In other words, the body of doctrines associated with science forms the
positive basis of esoteric comparison. Blavatsky, for example, hitched various
cosmic vibrations- the Fifth Element, the Akasha, the anima mundi, etc.-to
the now discredited concept of the interstellar luminiferous ether.•• Esoteric
groups today often turn to the sort of quantum physics found in Fritjof Capra's
Tao of Physics or the 2004 documentary Wlrat tire Bleep Do We Know? Besides
the significant distortions and inevitable anachronism involved in this strategy, the appropriation of dominant theories, often leaning heavily on analogy,
largely ignores what Hammer and others argue is the most crucial characteris·
tic of science: its method of inquiry. Defining this method as "intersubjective,
BABALON LAUNCl-llNG
131
repeatable, and error-correcting," Hammer cites Carl Sagan: "the method of
science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the
findings of science."'° Although sociological studies of science, especially in the
wake of Thomas Kuhn, have significantly qualified the idealized Popperian
view of scientific progress (especially with respect to the concrete practice of
falsification), the scientific method remains functionally open-ended and selfcorrecting.' ' And it is this method, Hammer states, that one "rarely if ever finds
in Esoteric movement texts."52
So what, then, are we to make of the "method of science" that Aleister Crowley proclaims to be one of the core tactics of his "Scientific Illuminism" and
that so compelled Parsons? On the surface, this method does not appear so
different from the theosophical parasitism that Hammer critiques. In his Co11fessions, Crowley claims, for example, that Thelema "co-ordinates the disconnected discoveries of science, from physics to psychology."" This assertion of
holistic integration is also implied by the terms of the motto itself-"The
Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" is not terribly far from William Q.
Judge's roughly contemporary claim that Theosophy was a "scientific religion
and a religious science."54 Nonetheless, there is an important difference
between these claims, one of which lends the Thelemic current and many of its
offshoots a different valence from the New Age line of "esoteric science" that
Hammercritiques. Crowley believed that it was possible to base an experiential
religion like the A:,A:. not on theory (quantum, dharmic, or otherwise) but on
"practice and methods.'"" This pragmatic methodology was, he claimed, sufficient to achieve illumination, or "spiritual experience." Such methodology, of
course, does not resemble normative applications of scientific method-the
absence of conventional frameworks of repeatability and the challenges of
quantifying subjective impressions and subjecting them to falsification assure
that it cannot. Nonetheless, Crowley's invocation of "practice and methods"
represents a more reflexive, pragmatic, and potentially naturalistic attitude
toward esoteric claims and evidence that those found in theosophical cosmology or the majority of its later offshoots.
In an important article on Crowley's embrace of naturalism, Egil Asprem
identifies three central elements of Crowley's scientific method: "the careful
use of a magical record to stress the externalization of personal experience
which makes inter-subjectivity possible, the conception of rituals as scientific
experiments, and the idea of testing the obtained results through intersubjectively verifiable methods."" Against the argument that Crowley was
simply repackaging magic for a more scientific age, Asprem argues conclusively
that, however we might judge the rigor of Crowley's method, we must recognize his naturalism as sincere. Cro,11Jey's empiricism partly reflects his early
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MAGIC IN MOOERNlTY
exposure to Theravada Buddhism, whose dry and disenchanting operations of
self-analysis were typically interpreted in his era as signs of a "rational religion." But it also stems from the practical and psychological orientation of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the extraordinarily influential British
occult group in which Crowley cut his esoteric teeth. While the Golden Dawn's
interest in initiatory rituals, ancient gods, and recondite angelic tongues certainly reflects a romantic reaction to the positivist intellectual orientation of fin
de si~cle Britain, its pursuit of the mysteries was also, as Alex Owen argues,
"entirely regulated by reason." Rejecting the passive mediumistic acceptance of
incoming preternatural forces represented by spiritualism, the Golden Dawn
occultists instead stressed the control of the mind and the active cultivation of
will, even as they explored the intuitive, haJJucinatory, uncanny, or irrational
dimensions of human consciousness (or, as some were learning to call it, the
subconscious). In a crucial passage, Owen clarifies the Golden Dawn's precise
partnership between intuition and reason: "If we assume the mythopoeic capabilities of the hidden regions of the mind, then advanced occult practice can be
understood as an extraordinary and controlled performance of the conscious
'I' in a mythos of mutual unconscious creation. By this reckoning, it is the
crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational
world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult 'real."'" While such experiences served in part to confirm
the reality of occult theories, a certain instrumental skepticism- a key element
of science- played an important role in the alignment that Owen describes.
One of the strongest examples that Owen provides is from Crowley, who warns
astral travelers of the need to distinguish between "authentic astral phenomena
and figments of personal imagination." leaving aside the ontological implications of this distinction, what is important to note here are the terms that
Crowley uses: "We must not assert the 'reality' or 'objectivity' of an Astral
being on no better evidence than the subjective sensation of its independent
existence. We must insist on proof."" As Asprem points out, what is particularly significant here is not only the invocation of scientific values (objectivity,
evidence, proof) but the fact that such assessments would necessarily occur
after the fact and would therefore reframe the raw material of visionary experience into a data set for later analysis (which also explains Crowley's insistence
on keeping records). In this way, Crowley partially undermines the "subjective
sensation" of authentic experience that underlies so many esoteric claims.
While the tradition of testing and identifying spirits is fundamental to the
rites of exorcism and strongly informs the Renaissance angel n1agic so important to the Golden Dawn, Crowley is not demanding proof of divine origin but
of independent origin-in other words, of some degree of reality beyond the
BA.SA LON LAUNCHING
m
individual imagination." For Crowley, such proof could sometimes be found
in the operations of gematria, kabbalistic numerological procedures that, taking advantage of the numerical equivalents of Hebrew letters, had originally
been developed as an esoteric engine of scriptural exegesis. Combini nggematria with the elaborate tables of correspondences that Crowley developed in
777-which Asprem calls a "periodic table of magic"-Crowley was able to sift
through the visual phantasmagoria of an astral trance to discover "internal
evidence" for the objective content of the visionary material and the independent existence of any beings encountered. As Asprem puts it, Crowley transformed a premodern hermeneutical procedure into "a 'scientific' formalism
which (allegedly) makes it possible to quantitatively assess certain visual
experiences and say something about their validity....• Given the recondite
procedures necessary to adjudicate such claims-which are certainly beyond
this author-let us nonetheless insist that Crowley's deployment of gematria
also reflects his unapologetic embrace of quantification, one of the defining
characteristics of modern science and Weberian rationalization alike. "For the
Work is to reduce all other Conceptions to these of Number," Crowley wr ites in
Liber Aleph, "because thus thou wilt lay bare the very Structure of thy Mind,
whose rule is Necessity rather than Prejudice." His conclusion is veritably
Baconian: "Not until the universe is thus laid naked before thee canst thou
truly anatomize it.1161
Quantification hardly exhausts Crowley's method of science. The sort of
evidentiary interrogations described above were paralleled (and in some significant ways contradicted) by a strong vein ofJamesian pragmatism, one that
reflected a disinclination to bother much about the ontological status of astral
or other magical phenomena. Crowley's most skeptical and positivist views
along these lines were expressed early in his career, especially in the "Initiated
Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic," which served as the introduction to the
version of the Goetia he published in 1904, itself largely based on material pre•
pared by Samuel MacGregor Mathers.62 Here, the demonic spirits conjured in
the "Triangle of Art" are considered to be nothing more than "portions of the
human brain," different from ordinary sensory neural events only in that they
are willed by the magician and "caused" by the operations of ceremonial magic.
later, after receiving 11,e Book of tlie Law and chalking up a myriad of preternatural encounters, Crowley would abandon such materialism, but an element
of it continued to feed the pragmatic and even constructivist dimension of
what he later called the "skeptical Theurgy" of the A:,A:..•, In a famous appen•
dix to Magick and 'Iheory in Practice, for example, he noted, "In this book it is
spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods,
Spheres. Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is
1}4
MAGIC IN MODBRNJTY
immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results
follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing reality or philosophical validity to any of them."'' Here, Crowley specifically calls for an
avoidance of ontological speculation, an avoidance that suspends reality claims
and forces a subjective and self-referential process of evaluating spiritual and
magical experiences. This is why I must disagree with Owen's claim that the
modern occult self"did not recognize the relativism of its own self-reflexivity."''
Here, and throughout his oeuvre, Crowley sounds a note of pragmatic relativism whose emphasis on practice ("doing certain things") can also be seen as a
more nuanced and reflexive expression of the "method of science"-a method
that here has less to do with objective analysis than with a commitment to an
ongoing experimental and empirical process that unfolds through a provisional and constructed "paradigm" ofsigns, symbols, and ritual procedures. In
Hammer's terms, Crowley certainly embraced the legitimizing role of direct
spiritual experience-as he wrote in a founding statement of the A:.A:.: "There
is only one Rock which Skepticism cannot shake; the Rock ofExperience."'6 At
the same time, Crowley, and Parsons after him, also appealed to an experimental and constructivist methodology in the staging and analysis of these individual "facts" of experience.
Ad Astra
Jack Parsons left us no systematic account of his understanding of the relationship between Thelema's method of science and rocketry's method of science.
Perhaps such an account was never in the cards. As we will see, Parsons was
involved in a variety of contradictory kinds of "code switching" between science and magical religion-sometimes rigorously policing the borders. at other
times poetically and perhaps indiscriminately mixing up the spheres. Given
this ambivalence, which itself reflects the methodological "flicker" of modern
magic, we need to approach Parsons's magical science by taking a closer look at
the scientific methodology he employed when building rockets and testing
explosives. In other words, we will understand what sort of magician he was
only by understanding what sort of scientist he was.
Malina characterized Parsons as "a self-trained chemist who, although he
lacked the discipline of a formal higher education, had an uninhibited and
fruitful imagination ..., Elsewhere, Malina referred to Parsons and Forman as
"enthusiasts." In one letter, Malina used the term "machinist." though this may
have referred to Forman; in 1940, at a point of evident frustration, he compared
the t\YO men to "inventors. in the \YOrst sense of the word!'l'i8 Here we have a
BABALON LAUNCHING
135
cluster of associations- invention, imagination, amateur passion- that identify Parsons more as an "artisan of directed explosives" than as a trained
practitioner of the rationalized and institutional knowledge production associated with the modern research university. That Parsons and Forman were able
to do research under the auspices of the institution at all is a testament not only
to von Karman's good sense but also to the emergence of the modern research
university itself. As Mike Davis notes, under the guidance of George Hale and
Robert Millikan, Caltech was establishing a new kind of partnership between
science and business, "a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory, and dassroom.',.. As later technological developments in California have
shown with great clarity, this "emergent technostructure" has thrived in part
through its ability to capture eccentric technological innovators like Parsons.
That said, Parsons was, in the end, a bit too much for the budding militaryindustrial complex. Though the reasons for Parsons's departure from Aerojet
and the later loss of his security clearance are complex, they do point to his
fundamental refusal to conform to structures of institutional authority."'
Given the very different institutional commitments of Parsons and Malina,
their partnership combined fundamentally different kinds of method. The two
young men did share the "dream" of rocket flight, a dream bequeathed to them
by science fiction and considered risible by many physicists and aeronautical
specialists in the 1930s." But they worked toward manifesting that vision along
very different lines. Along with Forman, Parsons expressed the uninhibited
and imaginative experimentalism of the artisan, an intense (and for many
years unremunerated) level of affective commitment, and a willingness to
repeatedly perform dangerous-albeit exciting-tests. Though hardly a straitlaced nerd, Malina had the outlook and priorities of a formal researcher; he not
only contributed his mathematical skills but also insisted on the disciplined
application ofrationalized procedure. After the initial hope of building sounding rockets was abandoned, the team focused on "theoretical studies" and
"elementary experiments." Rather than blast model rockets into the sky, Parsons and Forman spent most of the first few years at GALCIT testing station•
ary, comparatively fun-free rocket motors. In an account of the early GALCIT
program presented to a professional society, Malina attributed this approach to
von Karman:
He always stressed the importance of getting as clear as possible an
understanding of the fundamental physical principles of a problem
before initiatjng experinlents in a purely empirical n1anner.... Parsons
and Forman were none too pleased with an austere program that did not
include the launching, at least, of model rockets. They could not resist the
136
MAGlC tN MODERNITY
temptation of firing some models with black Powder motors during the
next three years. Their attitude is symptomatic of the anxiety of pioneers
of new technological developments. In order to obtain supPort for their
dreams, they are under pressure to demonstrate them before they can be
technically accomplished."
Here, the "temptation" to fire off rockets is seen as a kind of performative
dream that supplements the establishment of "fundamental physical principles" that might lead to actual technical achievements. While certainly having
fun with their unauthorized launches, Parsons and Forman were also ritualistically engaging in technological dramas whose expressive content invoked or
symbolically satisfied desires that were still as imaginative as they were technically feasible. While Malina may have been overreading the anxiety at work in
their drive-sometimes an exploding projectile is just an exploding projectile-his understanding of the nonrational or symbolic dimension of their
technological performances also helps illuminate the psycho-logic of magical
ritual. Years later, after the founding of Aerojet, Parsons would regularly display even more overtly ritualistic behavior during test rocket launches that had
already become institutionalized: he would stamp his feet and, to the unease of
the engineers, loudly chant Aleister Crowley's stirring "Hymn to Pan.• In both
these practices, which recall Malinowski's Portrayal of magic as a symbolic
supplement to technological control. we see the flicker of magic as it crosses
back and forth across sacred and technical registers.
In his biography of Parsons, George Pendle provides a clear account of the
methodological contrast between Malina and Parsons, a contrast that in
some ways replicates the conventional contrast between theory and experiment. To satisfy their research grant from the National Academy of Sciences,
the GALCIT crew needed to devise an engine capable of propelling a rocket for
ten seconds. No one had yet succeeded in building a rocket that sustained its
propulsive force for more than five. Parsons attacked the problem experimen·
tally, trying different mixtures of powder, using glues and other binders for
consistency, and consulting with powder experts at the explosives firms that
sometimes employed him. At one point, he employed a design for a multicellular fuel cell that he took from 71,e Crucible of Power, a 1939 Jack Williamson
science-fiction novelette. In the spring of 1940, apparently tired of hearing
explosions echoing across the Caltech campus, von Karmin concocted four
differential equations, telling Malina that their solutions would show whether
such a motor was theoretically possible; if not, Parsons would be asked to stop
testing. According to the historian of science Benjamin Zibit, these equations
provided an important insight into the necessary relationship between the sur-
8A8ALON LAUNCHING
137
face area of the burni.ng propellant and the size of the nozzle throat that
expelled the resulting gas." Parsons was encouraged to continue the work,
which eventually led to GALCIT-53, his breakthrough invention. With this
material (or, more accurately, this method of making the material), rocket
engines were eventually scaled up to the size and power necessary to penetrate
the stratosphere and, ultimately, space.
In the language of the gods, however, we must say that Parsons's rocket science drew more from Pan than from Apollo. Consider how we might account
for the nature of Parsons's technological breakthrough. Keeping the romantic
overdetermination of the eureka moment in mind, and acknowledging whatever influence local roofers or Parsons's knowledge of ancient warfare may
have played, Parsons's idea was by all accounts an essentially intuitive innovation, the sort of spontaneous insight or bolt from the blue that cannot be
deterministically generated through application of method or accounted for in
terms of inductive or deductive logic. Proclaiming that scientific intuition had
"nothing to do with any cold calculation." Weber himself wrote that the psychological processes behind inspiration in science and art were essentially the
same: "l>oth are frenzy (in the sense of Plato's 'mania') and 'inspiration.'"74 In
James Hillman's post-Jungian archetypal language, such mania is the work of
Pan, at least in his guise as the avatar of spontaneity: "Spontaneity means self.
generating, non-predictable, non-repeatable. It does not belong within the
domains of natural science as science is defined, allhough it does seem lo be a
natural phenomenon. To find laws of the spontaneous world would be a con•
tradiction in terms. For these events are irregular, lawless.""
Von Karman's equations proved that the rocket performance the GALCIT
crew needed was theoretically possible, but Parsons still needed to composeor discover, or invent- a material that would burn consistently. As in metallurgy, the mother of such materialist sciences, Parsons's research was an
empirical process of trial and error that, informed by his considerable knowledge of chemistry, probed or- in Deleuze and Guattari's words- "followed"
the variable potentials immanent in matter, rather than imposing a form or
procedure from the outside. In such a probe, the object being pursued "is less a
matter submitted to laws than ... material traits of expression constituting
affects." Parsons needed more than an explosive combination of chemical elements; in order to avoid the cracks and separations that would destabilize
combustion, he also needed to alter-or deterritorialize- the solidity or con·
sistency of the material in order to achieve ne,v and emergent properties. It was
a matter of intervening in what Deleuze and Guattari call the machinic phylum,
an "energetic, molecular dimension" that represents "matter in movement. i.n
flux. in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression."141
138
BADAi.ON LAUNCHING
MAGtC lN .MODERNITY
GALCIT-53 was a novel chemical formulation whose energetic potentials were
wedded to a literal "flux" of matter-the flexible, semiliquid flow of heated
asphalt whose phase transition or "threshold" state allowed the material to be
poured directly into the cylinders before solidifying.
Though some historians of aerospace have been chary in their accounts of
Parsons's contribution to space flight, Malina always acknowledged his contri•
bution.n In a historical account of the GALCIT program, Malina described
Parsons's breakthrough as "radical" and the fuel itself as "a new kind of material." Though the article is reasonably formal and aimed at a technical audience,
Malina also added that Parsons made his insight "no doubt after communing
with his poetic spirits."" Malina is being wry here. but only to a degree.
Although a skeptic, he did believe in the productivity of "poetry" as a mode of
thought. in science as well as art.79 He certainly recognized the role that the
visionary imagination played in the pursuit of rocket science in the 1930s, when
pulp magazines inspired rocket clubs, and the technical literature of space
flight written by isolated pioneers like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert
Goddard "was generally regarded more in the nature of science fiction.'>$()
Malina admired Parsons for his "uninhibited and fruitful imagination." His
reference to "poetic spirits" is thus more than an allusion to Parsons's occult
beliefs and their possible role in his asphalt inspiration; it is also a figure for
Parsons's imaginative or intuitive "method" of experimentally probing the
singular potentials of matter itself.
Parsons's subsequent scientific career shows that, despite his genius and his
vocational commitments, he was never able fully to submit to the rationalized
protocols that, for Weber, made modern life a grim and impersonal "struggle
of the gods" in a disenchanted world." But despite his romantic temperament,
Parsons did not follow proponents of"New Age science" in attempting holisti·
cally to fuse the value spheres ofscience and the holy. Instead, Parsons affirmed
the polytheistic struggle as such. As his late libertarian essay "Freedom Is a
'Iwo-Edged Sword" makes clear. Parsons rejected the rationalist ideal of a
consistent theory of the world and instead embraced a sort of ontological anar·
chism grounded in spiritual autonomy. "However useful, spectacular, or neces·
sary our ideas and experiments may be, they still have nothing to do with
absolute truth or authority:· he wrote. "Such a thing can only exist for the
individual, according to his whim or fancy, or his inner perception of his own
truth in being.'' Similarly, Parsons argued that "any system of intellectual
thought, whether it be science, logic, religion, or philosophy, is based on certain
fundamental ideas or axioms which are assumed. but \Vhich cannot be proven.
This is the grave of all positivism."" Magic, by contrast, was not so much a
system, in Parsons's view, as a method of navigating the polytheistic terrain. a
139
method that anticipates the "pluralism. relativism, probabilism, and pragma•
tism" that have come to characterize so many contemporary spiritual practitioners and new religious movemems."' In relativistically skirting foundational
axioms. magic dances on positivism's grave.
Per Aspera
While Parsons could be said to have brought a certain occult "style" or sensi·
bility to his rocket science, he conceptually maintained a separation between
the two spheres. The influence of Parsons's science on his occult work and
spiritual philosophy, however, is a more mixed affair. A number of comments
in his correspondence and essays suggest that be saw magic and science as. in
one biographer's words,• different sides of the same coin." For example, writing
to Helen in 1943, Parsons noted that rocketry "may not be my True Will, but it's
one hell of a powerful drive. With Thelema as my goal, and the stars my destination and my home, I have set my eyes on high.""' Here, desire is split into the
Thelemic will for transcendence and the Freudian drive for technological
achievement-or at least atavistic excitement, the sort of thrill seeking that, we
will see, Parsons pursued in his occult rituals as well. However, even as Parsons
splits his desire, he fuses it together again with the romantic and polyvalent
image of"the stars"-at once the literal goal of Parsons's rocket science and a
scripturally significant figure for his Thelemic aspirations. "Every man and
every woman is a star" is one of the best-known lines in The Book ofthe Law, an
image of cosmic singularity that represents both true origins ("my home") and
the final goal of spiritual transformation." The image of the stars brings Parsons's twin desires into accord and thus stages the very code switching that
Tambiah describes and that we will continue to track in the remainder of this
chapter. While maintaining a degree of separation between science and the
occult in his life and mind, Parsons nonetheless drew a thread of consistency
between them, subjecting them to a practical resonance. In other words, the
very space between science and the supernatural became a site-a secondorder magic, if you will-,vhere ne,v relations were conjured: relations bet\.\reen
ritual and experiment, spell and equation, method and madness.
Although Parsons did not keep the most meticulous magical diaries, and
although much of his correspondence remains in private archives, there is. in
addition to The Book of Babaw11 and his published essays, a valuable record of
Parsons's correspondence to Marjorie Cameron in 1949 and 1950.•• Though
initially bemused by Parsons's occult beliefs, Cameron became a willing student, and Parsons's occult pedagogy offers insight into his understanding of
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MAGIC IN MODl!RNJT'Y
Crowley's "method of science" as well as his broader intellectual framework,
which included Frazer, Joseph Campbell, and other nonoccultist scholars. In
his lessons, Parsons echoed Crowley's admonition to question and analyze all
the material gained through astral travel, telling Cameron that it was "necessary patiently to check and compare every source of information, eliminating
all possible errors and being sure that you are not fooled or fooling yourself."
Parsons called this "the application of ingenious scientific method to transcendental ends." Such a method does not attempt to "ground" transcendental
claims in a scientific or quasi-scientific theory but to critically test the affective
and mythopoetic phenomena of the inner planes. The grounds for establishing
the criteria for not "fooling yourself" are, needless to say, somewhat obscureone can hardly suppress the voice of Adorno, writing his "Theses Against
Occultism" in nearly the same place and time: "Their procedure is to be strictly
scientific: the greater the humbug, the more meticulously the experiment is
prepared.""
Following the contradiction earlier identified in Crowley, Parsons also
somewhat undermines his truth-seeking use of"ingenious scientific method"
with a self-reflexive attitude of epistemological relativism: "Indeed my personal
and interior experience, however hallucinated, must be at least equally valid
with the things I have been taught to call 'objective' and 'real.' But these are also
my truths-they are part of me-part of the equipment of my cosmic laboratory wherein I can begin an experiment in truth .., Here, the rhetoric of science
is at once undermined and redeployed. Inner experiences, Parsons acknowledges, may have nothing in them of science-of what, as moderns, we are
taught to recognize as reality or objectivity- since they may be nothing more
than hallucinations. Nonetheless, those groundless perceptions are valid
enough, presumably in their purely subjective effects, to become "equipment"
that can in turn be instrumentally applied to a deeper "experiment in truth."
Relativism here does not lead to the abandonment of the experimental framework of instrument, operator, and object; far from undermining the veridical
quest, relativism is precisely what lends the "method ofscience" a cosmic rather
than a positivist or even strictly psychological character.
Parsons concludes the passage, "I can think of no better starling point than
'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' -no better equipment than
the magical, scientific, and psychological techniques I have inherited. But all
these boil down to will, experiment, and honesty in regard to data:•• Notice
the absence of occult theory here. Instead, magic, science, and psychology are
all integrated on the same open plane of method and practice, a plane of experience that involves a subject that itself is tested. Here, faintly, we get a glimpse
of an "occult science"' that does not attempt to offer a theoretical account of the
BABALON LAUNCHCNG
141
nature of reality but instead treats experience as a kind of phenomenal flux that
is tested and intensified within a contingent and relativistic framework whose
conditions cannot be known so much as experimentally engaged. Though we
are now at a considerable distance from a conventional Popperian understanding of scientific method, we are not so terribly far from a constructivism that
understands that the equipment of the laboratory has a say in the results of the
experiment. Moreover, Parsons's "experiment in truth" is, al least in principle,
open-ended and even self-correcting, or at least self-intensifying, as the operator integrates honest data into further iterations of practice. We can see a selfconscious deployment here of the same process that Tanya Luhrmann identified
among British magical practitioners in the 1980s. "The basic attitude was that
you took nothing on faith, but you experimented with the practice, and eventually you would conclude on the basis of personal practice, that the magical
ideas were probably correct..., Luhrmann described this process, somewhat
limply, as "interpretive drift." Rather than embrace new beliefs, the new practitioner commits to practices whose penumbra of symbols and concepts begin
to make sense productively as the budding magician begins to perceive reality
in different modes; these initial glimmers then set the stage, in a sort of positive
feedback loop of practice and perception, for new sorts of emotions and experiences that in turn make occult concepts more useful or resonant.
That said, for all his talk of patience and care in the application of"ingenious
scientific method," Parsons's most thoughtful commentators describe him as
an erratic, reckless, and dangerously proud magician. The parallels with his
rocketry are impossible to ignore, and Parsons drew them himself. In 1949, at
the height of his mystical inflation, Parsons wrote,• ifl had the genius to found
the jet propulsion field in the US, and found a multimillion dollar corporation
and a world renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply
this genius in the magical field."90 Noting that Parsons had performed rituals
far in advance of his OTO grade work, Pendle claimed that, "as in his rocket
work, he left theory behind in the wake of his will to experiment."'' John Carter,
\vho believes that Parsons was "essentially a failure" as a magician, writes that,
"in his metaphysical life, the fearless Parsons showed the same methodology he
used in his rocket propulsion work, a tenaciousness in testing and a thrillseeker's Jack of caution concerning what he may 'conjurc.'"92 By describing him
as a thrill seeker, Carter is calling attention to Parsons's attraction to spectacular manifestations of what we might call, in light of today's growing Jedi faith,
"the dark side of the force." Well before Parsons commenced the Babalon
Working, members of the Agape Lodge were already concerned with the flavor
of his ritual intent. In 1945, Jane Wolfe wrote to Karl Germer, "our own Jack is
enamored with witchcraft, the hounfort, voodoo. From the start he always
141
MAGIC TN MODERNITY
wanted to evoke something-no matter what, I am inclined to think, as long as
he got a result."" In 1945, Gerald Gardner had yet to found the Brickel Wood
coven that ignited and reconstructed witchcraft as a positive religious identity
for moderns; when Wolfe wrote her letter, "witchcraft" retained the same sort
of dangerous aura among white Euro-American occultists that voodoo did.
For our purposes, what is most important about Wolfe's letter is the coupling
of black magic with a definitive "result."
In a letter to Cameron written five years later, Parsons provides another
angle on this linkage: "The invocation of Gods (which pertains to a higher
magic) is subtle and subject to individual variation and personal composition.
The invocation oflesser forces is exact, and, since love does not usually enter in
so much, in one sense fur more dangerous. In the higher work you are actually
wooing the god-it is an act of art. In the lower you are compelling, it is an act
of science ....• Here, remarkably, Parsons lays the symbolic/technical dualism of
the anthropological distinction between magic and religion onto the vertical
and moral hierarchy of the traditional Neoplatonic magical universe, with
gods asking for a subtle, erotic, and poetic art and the lower forces-elsewhere
defined as "Goetia (Demonic)"-responding only to an exact science of technical protocols. The danger in the latter path is not, for Parsons, moral threat so
much as a sort ofnaturalisticgoetic blowback, such as the "side phenomena" he
alludes to in another letter to Cameron, where he discusses the "Bornless Ritual" that Crowley adapted for his 1904 publication The Goetia: "It is a very
ancient, potent & dangerous ritual, often used by bold magicians in the Guardian Angel Working. It is useful as a preliminary in almost any sort of work,
causing a tremendous concentration of force. It is) ho,..,ever, liable to produce
dangerous side phenomena and sometimes permanent haunting in an area
where it is repeated, & is for this reason often avoided."" Though we should not
confuse the "Bornless Ritual" with unadorned black magic, the attraction that
sorcery and atavistic ritual held for Parsons is made clearer in light of the sym bolic transfer from his experience with rocketry. The invocation of dangerous
forces-what he calls in his occult lessons to Cameron the "sacrifice to the
abysmal gods"- produces, through the mediation of proper ritual, a tremendous "concentration of force" useful to the magician's ascent but liable to go
awry. Just as Parsons's animated recitation of Crowley's "Hymn to Pan" in
some sense ritualized the rocket tests, here we might say that rocketry, and the
instrumental causality that underlies it, "technologized" his understanding of
Goetia. Playing against type, Crowley roundly criticized Parsons for his interest in the dark arts: "All this black magic stuff is 75% nonsense and the rest
plain dirt," he ,vrote Parsons. "There is not even any point to it." Parsons wrote
back, "I know that witchcraft is mostly nonsense. except where it is a blind.''96
BABALON LAUNCHlNG
14}
This qualification is somewhat obscure, but by "blind" I suspect that Parsons
meant deterministic-lesser forces, we recall, are compelled by "exact" commands, by "science" rather than the "art" appropriate for higher forces.
This leads to a central question: what did Parsons want or expect to happen?
In a letter to Crowley about the Babalon Working, Parsons noted, "I have been
extremely careful and conscientious in this ritual, lending all my will and scientific training to its precision and preparation. Yet nothing seems to have
happened."'' Here, we cannot be comforted by the notion that Parsons sought
results strictly on the symbolic side of magic's expressive/technical divide.
Nor can his goals neatly be captured under the rubric of Crowley's "Spiritual
Experience:• by which Crowley primarily meant unitive mystical experience.
Instead, Parsons wanted-and expected-actual things to happen in the
physical world. When Parsons invoked Bartzabel, he wanted to attack L. Ron
Hubbard, and he later judged the working a success when Hubbard's yacht was
forced to return to shore. The Babalon Working, which Parsons called a
"magical experiment," was designed- with a bit of wiggle room for more symbolic interpretations-to incarnate a goddess into an actual human womb. The
same working also commenced with an operation to summon an "elemental,"
an operation that Parsons suggested was successfully realized in the (relatively)
simultaneous entrance of Marjorie Cameron into his life. And in The Book of
Baba/on, Parsons's play-by-play account of the working, Parsons carefully
includes half a dozen arguably paranormal events that he dubs "phenomena,"
which include relatively unremarkable instances of wind storms as well as
more eerie eruptions of poltergeist activity, "metallic" voices, and, in one
instance, the roof of an adjacent building catching fire. Though Parsons notes
that such phenomena are potentially signs of "imperfect technique" and that
only the "willed result" should obtain, he is still keen on recording them.
This is not the place to adjudicate Parsons's paranormal claims or to interpret the erratic and possibly pathological condition of his psyche in his final
years, when deep conflicts and an ominous dissociative undertow mark both
his actions and his writings." Instead, I want to draw attention once again to
the paradox of Parsons's attitude toward the efficacy of magical ritual in light
of the two value spheres that haunt this chapter and that defined his universe
of thought and practice: science and the sacral supernatural. Rather than favor
a symbolic, performative, or psycho-spiritual account of magic's value, Parsons- a "real" scientist, recall - sought palpable physical results from his
workings. Moreover. he seems to have been con1paratively tnore interested in
such materialist phenomena than his fellow magicians, who were, presumably.
reasonably content \l\ ith the dra1natic, expressive, and subjective din1ensionsof
their practice.
1
144
MAGrc IN MOOERNITY
Parson's Frazerian spirit cuts against any attempt to accommodate ritual
magic as an individually or socially meaningful practice whose value can be
understood in symbolic terms alone. In fact, as William S. Sax reminds us in
his discussion of ritual efficacy, the category of"ritual" is already predicated on
the tacit assumption that the practice in question doesn't actually do anything:
"To analyze rituals as 'expressing' inner states of feeling and emotion, or 'symbolizing' theological ideas or social relations, or 'representing' psychological
states of the human organism, is to neglect the question of how they might be
instrumental, how they might actually do things."99 For Parsons, ceremonial
magic was not a ritual-it was an "operation" or "experiment" with explicit, if
sometimes vaguely characterized, instrumental aims. According to his own
accounts, and to many of those who knew him, Parsons's rites actually "did"
things, though whether he was fooling himself-in his (or our) terms-remains
necessarily opaque. Still, Sax's question about ritual efficacy does encourage us
to "do" something else with Parsons's workings: to use our understanding of
those practices, and others before and after them, lo probe, in a pragmatic
manner that is not restricted to discursive intervention, the flickering phenomena that leap between the value spheres that organize modernity into Weber's
"polytheistic" space of competing reality claims. By applying the "method of
science" to occult e><perience with the aim of religion in mind, Parsons was
most emphatically not attempting to collapse the difference between the two.
Arrogantly, foolishly, heretically, experimentally, he was probing the gap, the
excluded middle, that constitutes their division and that echoes across a number of homologous divides that rend the fabric of modern experience: the gaps
between positivism and the holy, between magic as e><pression and magic as
1nanipu1ation, bet,veen rationalism and romance.
The principal fissure here, of course, is the divide between a disenchanted
world of deterministic causes operated on by instrumental actions and a symbolic, rhetorical, and dramatic domain of meaning and affect associated with
human consciousness (and its unconscious margins). The fissure is easy to
sense-it lies, for example, in the strong temptation to view Jack Parsons's
paranormal magical claims as, in Weber's words again, "plain humbug or selfdeception." Nonetheless, it is precisely in the extremity of those claims that one
can glimpse the very operations that sustain modernity's theater of disingenuous disenchantment. As Randall Styers argues at the conclusion of his work on
magic and social thought, "The instability of magic as a scholarly category, the
palpable artifice required to conjure it, serves to illuminate the contrivance
through which all rational objectivity is maintained.""• In the halflight of the
occult, the operative concept of rational objectivity is revealed as the surface of
an essentially magical operation that shapes the modern idea of science in the
BABALON LAUNCHING
145
popular imagination. Bruno Latour asks the obvious question: "How can we
speak of a 'modern world' when its efficacy depends upon idols: money, law,
reason, nature, machines, organization, or linguistic structures? ... Since the
origins of the power of the 'modern world' are misunderstood and efficacy is
attributed to things that neither move nor speak, we may speak of magic once
again." 101 Latour points us to the value of restoring or reengaging the discourse
of magic, whose very extravagance and liminal flicker destabilize the effort to
clearly separate the world of human symbols and desires from the natural or
fashioned world of objects.
In his critique of the term magic, discussed above, Jonathan Z. Smith complained about the logical contradiction implied in the fact that, in being opposed
to both science and religion, which themselves stand in opposition, the anthropological discourse of magic breaks the law of the excluded middle. However,
we might also say that magic is the excluded middle, the impossible simulacrum
that haunts and modulates the relativistic gap between value spheres and that,
in particular, confounds the Cartesian ruse that founds the modern subject in
the divorce of mind and matter. "Despite so much scholarly insistence that
subjectivity and desire must be cordoned away from the world of material
causality:• Styers argues, "magic illuminates the potency of their intermingling."'°'That said, even social scientists sympathetic to the immense complexity that characterizes the social and perceptual construction of reality quiver
before the implications of this intermingling. At the close ofLuhrmann's sensitive and sophisticated ethnographic study of modern British magical practitioners, she describes hov.• the "interpretive drift" discussed above transformed
her own experience. As she studied kabbalah, read tarot cards and astrology
charts, and participated in "pathworkings," Luhrmann began to perceive the
world quite differently: she began to have symbolically vivid dreams and imaginal experiences, felt energy moving through her body during ritual, and
"began to use the word 'spiritual' to describe a fuzzy set of relatively new phenomenological states, experiences and responses." In Crowley's words, she did
certain things and certain results followed. But, as a researcher, Lurhmann
needed to draw a line for herself as well, to establish that point beyond which she
could no longer consider herself an anthropologist. And that line was precisely
the point of"asserting that rituals had an effect upon the material world."'"'
Jack Parsons-whose personality is almost a caricature of the "romantic rationalism• that Luhrmann analyzes-had no such qualms, and his passionate
instrumentality reminds us that romance and rationalism are not simply balanced v.•ithin the occult or kept in neat co1npartn1ents. Modern magic, at least in
the Thelemic current traced here. is a second-order phenomenon, an ambiguous
fluctuation that appears so1netimes as religion, son1etimes as science. sometimes
146
MAG IC IN MODERNJTY
as an atavism, and sometimes as a postmodern pluralism. In this sense, the
occult milieu is not simply another subculture pursuing religious or spiritual
values in the multiplying margins of modernity's rationalized institutions,
political ideologies, and dominant perceptual frameworks. Instead, the occult is
a direct engagement, at once romantic and methodical, with the very ambivalences, contradictions, and ambiguous margins that characterize the reality field
of modernity itself, with its polytheistic field of heterogeneous, dynamic, and
disenchanted "gods." Properly speaking, such occult practice does not seek simply to "re-enchant" the world or to establish some integral holistic field of mystical science. As Crowley's powerful notion of"skeptical Theurgy" itself indicates,
modern magic-or at least a vital strain of it-is already too disenchanted for
that, too naturalistic, too self-reflexive. Instead, magic is an aggressive performance of pluralism, a playful and tricky theater of possibility whose "structured
ambiguity rests upon a deconstructed notion of belief."'°' The "doubly double"
character that Smith criticized in social-scientific accounts of magic is not, in
this sense, a sign of conceptual weakness but rather a display of magic's furtive
and phantasmic appearance, within the space of modernity, as a mischievous
mediator or probe of overlapping reality claims. In this way, the method of science does indeed satisfy the aim of religion-a pluralistic and pragmatic religion
of only relative enchantments.
NOTES
,. Parsons also went by the name John Whiteside Parsons and, as a ch ild, Marvel Parsons;
Jack is the name used most frequently in the accounts of those who knew hint.
2. Crowley's signature spelling of"magick." the sexual and specifically Thd emite con no·
tations of which Parsons avidly pursued, will not be retained in this chapter for the sake of
clarity.
3. Max Weber) "Science as a Vocation," in Fr()m }t'fax V{eber: Es.says in Sociolugy, ed. H. H.
Cenh •nd C. Wright Mills (London: Psychology Press, 1991), 139, 154.
4. For some of these cntidsms, .see Peter PcJs. '"Introduction: Magic and Modernity," h1
.h1agic. and Modernity: Interfaces of Rt\lelation and Concealment. ed.. Birgit Meyer and Peter
Pels (Stanford: Stanford Univt'rsity Press) 2003), 26-29; for more o n the enchantments of
modern science and technology. see Erik Davis, TechgnosiS; Myth. Magic, and Mysticism it1
the Age of Infornu'1io11 (London: Serpent's Tail, 2004), esp. 164-224.
5. Weber. "S<:ienceas a Voc.ation," 143.
6. Ibid.• 141.
7. Ibid., 15-4.
8. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capit4lism, trans. Talcott Parsons
(Mineola, N.Y.: DoYer, 2013), 182.
9, Pels, "Introduction."' 28-29; and Weber, ''Science as a Vocation," 135.
1o. Tanya M. 1,.uhrmann, Persuasiot1s oftl,e \¥itch's Craft; &t11al Magic in Contt,nporary
E11gland (Cambridg~ Har vard Univer$ity Press. 1991), 337-44 (quotation at 337).
11• Randall Styers• .hifakfng Magic Religion, Magic, and Scie11ct- 111 the Modern World (New
York: Ox.ford University Press. 2004). 8.
8ABALON LAUNCHING
147
12. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relat111g Religion: Essays in the St11d)' of Religion (Chicago: University ofChic~go Press, 1004), 11s-11 (quotation at 218). For ex.ample, Durkheim declared that
,nagic was similar to relig·ion but •more elen1entary"; n1ore dichotomously, it derived its power
b)' •profalling holy things.. and performing .. the contrary of the re)jg:ious ceremony." See.£1nile
Durkheim, T11e Ele,nentary forn1s of the Religious Lift (New York: Free Press. 1965), 57. Sin1ilarl)', ?,..1alinowski wrote that while rehg1on docs not prod\1ce the sort of specialists that magic
claims, its mythology is nonetheless "1nore varied and more complex as well as more creative."
See Bronislaw ~lahnowski, Aifagk, Se1e11ce, and Religion and Other Essays (Whitefish, ~font.:
Kessinger, 2004), 68.
13. Pc1s, "Tntroduction," 10. See also James George Frazer, 1he Golden Bough (Mineola,
N.Y.: Dover, 1001), 50.
14. Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic. Scitnct, Rtligfou, and the Scope of Rationality (New
York: Cambridge UniverSity Press. 1990), 82.
15. My account of Parsons's story is drawn principally fro1n Joh1i Carter, Sex anti Rocktts:
·n,e Ou11lt World of J11ck Parsons (Los Angeles: feral House, 2005); and George Pendle,
Strange At1gel: The Otherworldly Life of l(()(ktt Scientist John \Vhiresidt Parsons (Orlando:
Harcourt, 1005). Also highly worthwhile is 11,e Aifarvel, an online comic-book b iography
written by Richard Carbonneau and drawn by Robio Sin101l, accessed October 31, 2010, http://
www.webcomksnation.com/rscarbonneau/parsons/toc.php.
16. Pendle, Strange Angel, 46, 44.
17. Car ter, Sex and Rockets, 8. 18.
18. Pendle, Strange Angel, 1s7.
19. At least according to von Kirm:ln. See law·rence S\ltin, D" ~Vhat 1ho11 \Vilt: A Life of
Aleisttr Crowley (Ne,,; York: Macmillan, 2000), 396.
20. Carter, Sex and Rockets, 72.
11. lo 2013, Aerojet merged with Prall & \Vhilney Rocketdyne to form Acrojet Rocket·
d)·ne.
22. Quoted in Ptndle, Strcu,ge Angtl, 9.
23. Carter, Sex and Rockets, 86.
24. Ibid.. 56.
25. Pendle, Strange Angel, 270.
26. A )'Oung actor and communist named Harry f.(ay was h ired to play the organ for the
lodge's Gnostic ~lass. Though Hay could not resist adding ditties like "Barnacle Bill the
Sailor" a11d "Yes! We I Tave No Bananas" to the accompaniment, Crowley remain«! an in flu·
ence on the ga)' rights p ioneer; announcing the first Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries
in 1979, Hay ended his exhortalion to "dance in the moonlight" with a quotation from Crow·
ley·s Book ofthe Law. Sec Harry Hay, "A CaH to Gay Brothers," in his Radically Gay: Gay Lib~
era.lion in the ivords of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 241.
17. Carter, Sex and Rockets, 55 .
28. Quoted in Pendle, Strange Angel, 2ss.
19. \Vhile intimately related to the city Babylon, ,,,rhich in the guise of a whore plays a vital
allegoric.al role in the book of Revelation, Crowle)•'s "Ba.balon.. replacts lhe y with an a for
reas.ons most likely related to Kabbalistic gematria and the 13,nochian system of n,agi,.
30. An influential figure in LA.'s postwar bohen1ian and occult scenes and a good friend
of \Vallace lkrman, Dennis Hopper, and George Herms, Cameron bee.a me a painter and
occasional actress, upstag:i11g Ana'is Nin as the Scarlet Vv'oman in Kenneth Anger's 1954 film
Inauguration ()f the Plet1s11re Donut. See Spencer Kansa, ivorn1wood Star: The J\1(fg1ck1ll lifc of
J\tarjorie Cameron (Oxford: l\1andrake, 2010).
31. 11\e reception of L1ber 49 pro,•ides a fruitful ilhunination of how the authenticit)' of
lllodcrn occuh re,·elalion is constructed and resisted, at leasl within the OTO and Thelemainspired commun1lles. Parso1\S ,vas a charis1na.tic figure ofson1e authority; nonetheless, his
revealed text. which declares it~lf .. ,he fourth chapter of the Book of the Law," has been
widely rejected as such, on both sub~tantial and stylistic grounds. \.Vriting in a Typhonean
148
MAGlC IN MODERN I TY
OTO publication. Michael Stale)' notes, • tn terms o f conlent, level ofinspiralion, and style:.
Liber 49 is nothing like The Book of the /...aw; and 011 this basis a lone, the claim can be looked
at askance... !\1ichae1 Staley, •i:selovcd of Babalon," Starfire 1, no. 3 (l989), acccs~d October u,
:ion, http://www·. skeptictank.org/belovob.htm. In 711t Red Goddess (London: Scarlet J mprint,
2008), 163, Peter Grc)' describes the text as "a poor productic,n with so1ne howlingly bad lines
only redeemed by a few shots of brilliant blood red darity.•
32. Pendle, Strange Angel, 240.
33. l\.1elton's accou,u can be found in his braicnly sympathetic treatment of Scientology.
Sec J. Gordon ~1elton, 11,e Church ofScie11tology (Salt Lake Cit}'! Signalure.1000). 7.
34. For Parsons's essays, sec Joh n V/hiteside Parsons, Frtedom ls a T,vo-Edgtd Sword;
Essays, ed. I Iyinenaeus Reta and l~tarjoriel Cameron (Las Vegas: Fako1l Press, 1989); and
John VVhiteside Parsons, Three tssays on Frttdom (York Beach, 1'.-1.aine: Teita n Press, 2008).
For Parsons's letter (dated February n, 1952, to Karl Genner), see Pendle, S1rat1ge Angel,
296.
35. In aJJitioo to Cartt'r and Pendle, sec Kenneth G..-a.1H, 111e A,fagi'cal Revival (London:
Starfire, 1010), 157-71; a more feverish accou1\t can be fou nd in Kenneth Grant, 01ds;de tl,e
Cir-des ofTi,ne (London: Frederick 1'.1u1ler, 1980), 45-52. See also Staley, • aeloved of .BabaIon";
Paul R)·dttn, /ack Pc,rso11s and 1he Fall of Babalon (1994; c1ectronic version copyright 2009);
Richard ~fct1.ger, "l11e Crying ofLiber 49: Jack Parsons, Antichrist Superstar,'' in &ok ofLies:
11,e Disinformation Guide to J\iagick and the Octult, ed. Richa rd ?,.,1etiger (New York: Disin •
forination Company, 1008), 198-21 1; Nikolas Schreck and Zeena Schreck, Demon$ of the flesh:
'J11e Con,pl~te Guide to l.eft /Jaud Path Sex A1ag,c (Sa11 Francisco: Creati01l, 2001), 302-29; and
Anthony Testa, 11,e Kty of the Abyss: Jack Parsons, tire Babalon Working, and the Black Pil·
gri,nage Dccodtd ( Raleigh, N.C.: Lulu.coin, 2006).
36. Pendle. Stra,ige Angel, ;30. Remarkably, at least a few scholars. among them Jan1es
Lewis a nd J. Gordon Melton, consider the Church of Scientology account at least as plausible
as the OTO account. The question o f the inOue1~ce of'lbelema or Parsons on D ia netics/Scientology is contro\1ersia); while t\•felton insists that therc is ",io direct OTO in fl uence," Hubbard
spoke favorably of Crowley and his concept of will in 1952 (POC Lecture 18). Sec J. Gordon
1'.1elton, "Birth of a Religion," in ScientologJ~ed. James R. Lewis (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 21.
37, Mike Davis, CUy of Quartz: Extavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso.
2006), 5)-60 {quotation at 5S),
18. t,.1et1ger, "Crying of Libcr 49," 100. Parsons also makes a thinly disguised appearance
a.s the occult scientist Hugo ChantrcUe in A nthony Boucher's 1942 science-fiction roman :i. clef
Rocket to tht Morgue.
39. For a livd)' recent telling o f Dec's Hfe, see Benja m in \Voolley. "Ihe Queens Conjurer.
The Sc,ence and !t<fagic of Dr. John Dee. Advisor to Quetn Elfaabetl1 I (New York; Macmillan,
2001); see 3lso Pete r J. French, Jolu1 Dee: 11,e \Vorld of"" Elizabethan Magus (London: Psychology Press, 1987). Parsons himself noted this correspondence a Ce," years after the fact,
writing to Cameron that .. ,he parallel with my own \.Vork1ng with l~on is appalling." That
s.1.id, Parsons overstates the similarities. See ..Corre~pondeuce Between Jack Parsons and H is
'Elemental,' ,\>farjode Cameron." ed. lMarjorie) Cameron and H ymenaeus Beta, Jan\lary 25,
1950, accessed September 2;. 2ou, http:flhlacklies.xenu.ca/archivts/33S4.
40. Jack Parsons, 111e Collected \\fritings ofJack Parsons (a few versions o f thi,; widdy cir·
culated unpublished docu1nent exist), accessed September 2S, 1011. www.hollyw·oodinsiders
.net/texts/parsons.pdf.
4 1. Jeffrey J. Kri pal. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranonnal and the Sacred (Chicago:
Unh·ersity of C hica.go Pres~. 2010), 1,;, 34. A nother echo o f Kripal'.s thesis: dur ing thc initial
phase of the Babalon Vv'orking, Parsons wa~ woken up by nine Joud, u nexplained knocks. I le
nottced a lamp smashed on the Ooor. The Enochian \\ford fo r .. la mps" i~. a t least according to
sonH? Enochian dictiona r ie-s, uuBARDO, HenJarnin Rowe, E11oc'1u,11 Dlct1011ary, the He rmetic
l ibra ry, acce-ssed May 5, 10l6, http:/lhermetic.com/norton/papers/eodlc.txt.
BABA.LON LAUNCHING
149
42. Quoted in Tambiah, ,\1agic., Science, ReUgion, 23.
43. Carter, s~x anti R(J,(kcts. 72.
44. ri.1artin P. Starr. 1he Unknown God: W. T. S111ith and tile 11,elemite.s {Bolingbrook. Ill.:
Teilan Press, 2003), 254.
45. Quoted in Pendle. Strange Angel, 168.
46. Tambiah, h1ag,c, Se1e,rce, Religion, 92.
47. Parsons, Collected \Vritings ofJack Parsons, unpaginated (l9).
48. O la\• Hammer, Clain1h1g Knowledge: Strategies ofEpiste1nologyfron1 Theosophy to the
,'f\few Age (Leide1\: Brill, 2001), 32;.
49. See Helena Petrovna Bfavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the .i\1ysteries ofAncient
011d J\iodern Sciente and Theology (San D iego: Aryan ·n,eosophical Press. 1919), especially
Jl0-12, 340-49, 393-97.
so. Hammer, Clainung Knowledge. 204 .
51. See Luhnuann's brie( but insightful discussion in Persuasions of the \\!'itch's Craft,
123-25; see a lso Tambiah, h1agic, Scie,ice, Relig;on, 140 ,;4.
52.. Hammer, Clain,ing Knowledge, 204.
S). Aleister Crowley1 '111e Confessions of Aleister Crowley; A.n Autohagiography, e-d. John
Symonds and Kenneth Grant (Londo1\: Arkana, 1989), 399.
54. Q uoted in f.[ammer, Clain1ing Knowledge, 122.
55. Confessions ofAleisler Crowlt·y, 296.
56. Egil Asprcm, •Magic Natu ralized.? Negotiating Science and Occult Experience in
Aleister Crowley's Scientific [lluminis m," Aries: Journc,I for tile Study of \Vestern Esotericism
8, no. 2 (2008): 151.
S7- Alex Owen, Tire Place of E11cl,a11tn1e,rt: 8ritislr Occultisn1 and tile Cult11re oflhe Modern
(Chicago: Uni\'ersity of Chicago Press, 1004), 239, 182.
58. Aleister Crow le)', Magick in Tl1eory and Practice (New York: Dover. 1976), 256.
59. For a discussion of te-sting spirits, see NanC)' Caciola, Disct•r11111g Spirits: Divine a11d
Dtmo111c Possession 111 the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cor nell University Press, 2003), 274- 98.
6o. Asprem, "!\•tagic Naturaliz.ed," 161- 62.
61. A leister Crowley, Liber Aleph vel CXI: 111e Book of lVisdom or Foll)', in tltt Form ofan
Epistle of666, the Great \Vild BtA$l lO His Son 777, Being the Equinox, \folun1e ll/, 1''u111ber VJ
(York Beach, Maine-: SamucJ \Veiser, 1991), l,
62. Aleister Crow·Jey a11d Samuel Lid dell MacGregor Mathers, Tire Coetia; 1he Lesser Key
o/Solo,norr the Ki,ig(Newbut)•port, Maine: Weiser, 1995), 15- 20.
63. Quoted in Jame-s A. EshelntaJl, The ,Wystital and ,Wagical Sysren, of the A:.A:. (Los
Angeles: College ofThdema, 2008), 39. A lso sec t\1arco Pasi, "Varietiesof !\1agical Experienc-e:
Aleister Cro\11ler's Views on Occult Practice,"' Aifagi<, R,tua/, and Witcl,craft 6, no. 2 (2011):
123-62. Q ua li(ying Asprem's presentation of the ..naturalized" Crowle)', Pasi convincingly
argues that Crowley, in order to ground h is own prophetic aspirations as the founder of a new
relig ion, created a "protected core where a 'disenchanted' \tision of occult experience would
not be allowed" (124).
6 4. Crowley, A1agitk in Thtory and Practice, 247, 375.
65. Owen, Place of Enchant,nent, 148.
66. Q uoted in Eshel1nan, l''1J•slica/ and A1"gical Systen1, 40.
67. frank ~1ahna. "On the GALCIT Kocket Research Project. 1936- 38," in First Steps
Toward Spat'e: Proceedings ofthe First a11d Second History Symposia of the /11ter11atio11al Acaden,y of Astronautics at Belgrade, Yugoslavic,, 26 Scple111ber 1967, and New York, U.S.A., 16
October ,968, ed. i:redcrick C . Durant Ill a nd George$. James (San D iego: A1nerican Astro•
nautical Society, 1985), 113-24.
68. Ibid., 113; Pendle, Strange Angel, 63; a nd Carter, Sex and Rockets, 48.
69. Divis, Cityo/Quarlz. 57.
70. The ~cienhlic d irector of Aerojet was frank Zwicky, a (:ahech ~d entist who d islike d
Parsoos. Against Parsons's stroog advke, Zwicky. w ho was technically Pan.ons's superio r,
MAGIC IN M0D£R.N"1TY
150
BABALON I.AUNCHIN(j
ordered a batch of nitromcthanc for use as an oxidizer for liquid rocket fuel. \Vhen Parsons,
who considt'rcd the material too volatile. came across the ship111ent, he intentionall)' dcto
nated it on co1npany property. lhough Malina ultimately supported the ac1ion, the incident
reflected Parsons's attitude toward institutional authority, if not his abiding co1npt1lsion to
4
blow things up outside normal channels.
71. In "GALCIT Rocket Research Project," 113, Malina tips his hat to Jules Verne's Dt la
terre la /uric, which he read as a boy in Czechoslovakia.
a
72. Ibid .. 114.
73. Pendle, Strange Angel, 163.
74. \Vel>er, ""Science as a Vcx:;Uion," \35, 136.
75, James Hillman and V/ilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Pan and tht Nigh1mare (New York:
Spring Publications. 2.000). 77.
76. CilJes L)eleuzc and Felix Guattari, A 1houUJnd Plateaus: Capitalism and Sclu'iophreni'a, trans. Brian 1'.iassunli (Minneapolis: University of l\tlinnes.ota Press. 1987), 408. 409.
77, Frank H. Winter. for example. characterizes the- casting of solid fuel as a "'break•
through'" but does not 1nention Parsons, calling Malina "'the driving force .. ofa "small pool of
scientists and other enthusiasts." See Frank ti. Winter, Prelude U> tl,e Space Age: The Rocker
Soc,etics, ,924-1940 (\\l'ashington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1983), 102-3.
78. Frank i\>talina, "'The US Army Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project. GALCIT
Project No. 1, 1939-1946: A Memoir,'" in EsstJys on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics,
vol. 2. ed. R. C . Hall (\Vashington, 0.C.: NASA. Scientific and Technical lnfonnation Office.
1977), 174, 172.
79. After leaving the United States and Aerojct in the 1950s, Malina became a kinetic art·
ist and painter in France: he later founded the pe-er-reviewed arts journal Leonardo, which to
this da)' focuses on the interaction between the arts, science, and technology.
So. Malina, "'GA LCIT Rocket Research Projett,'" 114.
Sl. \\Teber. "Science as a Vocation;" 148.
81. Parsons, Freedo,,1 Is a Two.Edged Sword, 12, u.
83. Y\'eS Lambert, "Religions in Modernity as a Ne\\• Axial Age;" Soc;ology of Religion 60,
JlO, J (1999): J.tJ; also see the discussion of such compartmentalization in modern occult
thought in Luhrmann, PtNuasions oflhe Witch's Craft, l-83-386.
84. Quoted in Pendle, Strange Angel, 18, 168-69.
85. "Rvcr)' man and every woman is a star.'" Liber AL vel legis, 1.3, accessed October 10,
2.011. http:/lww,\f,Sacred·texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm.
86. "Jac.k Parsons and His 'Elemental.''" These letters were prepared at the same time that
C.tmeron and 14ymenaeus Beta wert" edittng Free,Jom Is a Two-Edged Sword. but they were
never published. A complete edition of Pa.rsons•s writings and important corr<"spondence is
long overdue.
87. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Da,,raged T..ife (London: Verso-.
1974), Z4),
88. Par.sons to Cameron, January ,17, (1950), in "'Jack Parsons and f-lis 'Elemental.''"
89. Luhrmann also noted that "at was not so much that the ideas were being tested. but
that they were being used.'" Luhrmann, l'ersuasio11s ofJl,e ~·lhtl1's Craft, 142,.
90. Quoted in Pendle 1 Strll11ge Angel. 18.
91. Ibid .. 219.
92. Carter, Sex and Rockets, a48.
93, Quoted in Pendle, Strange A,igel. 1s8.
94. Parsons to Ca1neron, January 16. (1950?), in "'Jack Pa~ons and His 'Elemental.""
95. Ibid. The ritual was originally a Grtro•Egyptian rite of exorcism, mo~t recently trans·
lated h)' 1tans Dieter Betz .i.s "'lhc Stele of Jeu the Hleroglyphist'"; it \1/3.S adapted for Cro,vley•s
1904 pubhcatio11 The Goetia and later further altered by Cro,vley for inclusion in l.iber Sa,nekil.
S« Ale:< Sumner, "The Hornless Ritual." Jo11rnal of 1he lVestertt Nlystery Tradition 1, no. 7
151
(Autumnal Equinox 2004), accessed October 16, 2.011, http://www.Jwmt.org/\'1n7/bornless
.html.
96. Quoted in Pendle, Strange Angel, 157. Notably, it was in Crowlc>•'s introduction to 111e
Goetia that the Beast produced his most positivist and naturalistic account of ceren1onial
magic.
97. Quoted in ibid.) 257, 261.
98. Most notable here is Parsons's account of a magical working he described to Germer a
few months before his death, using terms that mix ps)'choanalytic and "'technica1• 1anguage:
"'The operation began auspiciously '"ith a chromatic display of ps)'chosomatic symptoms, and
progressed rapidly to acute psychosis. ·1he operator has altered satisfactorily between manic
h)'Steria and depressing melancholy stupor on approxi1nately 60 (40?) cycles. and satisfactory
progress has b«n n1aintained in social ostracism, economic collapse and mental dis.as.soda·
tion." Parsons, In the Contuu1u111 4, no. 9: 40.
99. \Villiam Sturman Sax, "'Ritual and the Problem of Efficacy,'" in Tht Problcn1 of Ritual
Efficacy, ed. \Villiam Sturman Sax, Johannes Quack, :ind Jan Weinhold (New York: Ox.ford
University Press. 1010), 6.
100. Styers, A111ki11g Magi',, 225.
101. Bruno Latour, 11,e Pasteuritlltion of Frn11ce {Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993), 209.
101. Styers, /.faking Magic, 22.6.
103. Luhrmann, Persuasions of
~Vitch~ Craft, 319. 310.
,,,e
10•.
[bid .• 336.